The background/introduction description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The most important aspect of human memory is context. We remember events by time, place, person and category. The present disclosure (hereinafter, SkyCHRON) is a new scheduling related technology that integrates file tracking in a way that more closely mimics the human memory contextual model, allowing users to organize, share with appropriate privacy and find their files in a more intuitive way that is closer to how our brains actually work.
Ever since the advent of the personal computer, users have struggled to manage their files. Files have traditionally been organized into folder structures, which tend to quickly become obsolete with disuse, or require a high degree of maintenance to remain useful as a user's needs change over time. As our lives have become ever more connected, and users generate and share ever more files, the problem of keeping these files organized and retrievable over the long term becomes ever more complicated.
In addition to the drawbacks of maintaining folders as the primary organizing interface to a user's files, such folders typically lack context about the files they contain and the relationships between different files and events. More recently, the prevalence of search technologies have made it easier to locate individual files, but often at the expense of losing context around those files. Though files are time stamped, chronology is treated almost as an afterthought in today's computer systems. No system today has incorporated rich chronology and associated context deeply into the user's interface to their files.
Some rich context and chronology is captured in individual applications such as current calendar applications and journaling systems, but this information does not persist with individual files. Calendars are primarily used to keep appointments, not organize and relate files. More advanced calendars allow files to be stored within events, but still use the same old “file in folder” paradigm. Some calendar systems even allow sharing between users and categorization of events, but little of this context remains useful to the user long term. Diary and journaling applications also suffer from the same problems as calendars, in addition to being primarily backward facing in their design. None of these applications capture rich contextual information about files and relationships between files automatically, nor are they designed to preserve such information to be useful in long term storage and retrieval.
Cloud storage to date has created more backup options for users, but done little to improve the capture of contextual information about those files. Typical cloud storage systems are used as a “virtual hard drive” that promises not to lose the data, but does little that is new in organizing or retrieving it.
Recently, social networks have begun to generate a large amount of contextual information, but this information is not captured in a way that assists in organizing all of an individual's files. What information is captured, only applies to what has been shared on the social network site. Social networks are focused on providing context for external users, for shared information, not for individuals maintaining their own information privately.
SkyCHRON is the first system to make chronology the primary interface for organizing user files, creating and maintaining rich contextual information about those files in the process.